Watch Your Own Game Tape

On Monday morning, every NFL coaching staff in the country is in a dark room watching Sunday’s game. Every snap. Slowed down, rewound, paused. The quarterback who threw for 350 yards is in there too, watching himself miss a read in the second quarter that nobody in the stands noticed.

Nobody calls that insecurity. They call it the job.

Now think about your sales calls. The calls where the money gets made or lost. How many have you watched back?

If you’re like almost every owner I know, the answer is zero. You’ve run hundreds of them, maybe thousands. You have a story in your head about how you sell, and that story has never been checked against the footage. You think you’re a great listener. You think you handle price well. You think you ask good questions.

Maybe. But you’re grading yourself from memory, and memory is the most generous judge you’ll ever meet.

Gong has analyzed millions of recorded sales calls, and two numbers jump out. The top performers on B2B calls talk about 43 percent of the time and let the buyer talk the other 57. The average across all calls? The seller talks around 60 percent.

That gap doesn’t sound like much. It’s huge. It’s the difference between a call where the buyer explains his problem and a call where you explain your solution to a problem you guessed at.

And almost nobody thinks they’re the one talking 60 percent. Every guy I’ve sat down with to watch his first recording has the same reaction about six minutes in. He winces. Then he says something like “I didn’t realize I did that.” Then he does it again two minutes later on the screen, and he winces again.

The tape is how you find out which guy you actually are.

You can’t review what you didn’t capture. So the first move is boring: every sales call gets recorded, from now on.

I use Fathom for this. It joins my Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams calls, records them, writes a transcript, and gives me a summary with the action items when I hang up. The part that matters for this exercise is that it shows talk time, so you see your ratio without doing math. It’s free to start, and it takes about four minutes to set up.

Two rules on recording:

Pick one hour a week. Friday afternoon works, because the week’s calls are fresh and nothing urgent is coming in. Put it on the calendar as “Film Room.” Don’t skip it for client work. The client work is what this hour makes better.

In that hour, you review two calls, start to finish, actually paying attention. Ten skimmed calls will teach you less than two real ones. Pick them like this:

Grab a notepad, pull up the recording, and play it at 1.5x speed. You’ll get through a forty five minute call in thirty. Pause whenever you see something.

Here’s the scorecard. Seven items, each scored one to five. Use the same seven every time, because the point is to watch the numbers move over the weeks.

Check the number. If you’re over 55 percent on a discovery call, that’s your first problem, and it probably explains a lot of the others. On a demo or presentation call, you’ll naturally talk more. On a first call, you shouldn’t be the one doing most of the talking.

Did you set an agenda? Did you ask what they wanted to get out of the call? Or did you jump into small talk and then straight into your pitch? Watch the first five minutes closely. Most deals are won or lost in them, and most guys never think about them.

A clean opening sounds like this: “Thanks for the time. I’d like to spend most of this learning about what you’re dealing with, then I’ll share how we might help, and we’ll figure out together if it makes sense to keep talking. Sound good? Anything you specifically want to make sure we cover?”

Count them, and more importantly, look at what kind they were. Were they about the buyer’s problem, or about your product? Did you ask follow-up questions, or did you move on as soon as you got an answer?

The best question on any sales call is usually the second one. The buyer says “our leads have dried up.” The average guy says “we can fix that.” The good guy says “when did you first notice that?” and then “what did you try?” and then “what happens if it doesn’t get fixed by spring?” Watch how many times you jumped to the fix.

Find the longest stretch where you talked without the buyer saying anything. If it’s over two minutes, watch the buyer’s face during the back half. You’ll see the exact moment he stopped listening. Almost everybody does it, usually right when explaining how their thing works.

Break up any explanation over ninety seconds with a check-in. “Does that match what you’re seeing?” “Is that relevant for your team?” It keeps him in the call.

How did you handle money? Did you say the number clearly and then shut up? Or did you say it, flinch, and immediately start justifying it or offering a discount nobody asked for?

Watch the three seconds after you say your price. That’s the most honest footage on the whole tape. If you filled the silence, you gave away ground you didn’t have to give.

When the buyer pushed back, what did you do? Did you get defensive and explain why he was wrong? Or did you get curious and ask what was behind it?

“It’s more than we expected” usually isn’t a no. It’s the start of the real conversation, so ask, “More than you expected compared to what?” Most guys hear the objection and start selling harder. Watch yourself do it. Then practice the question.

How did the call end? With a specific next step, on a specific date, that the buyer agreed to out loud? Or with “great, I’ll send something over and we’ll touch base”?

“Touch base” is where deals go to die. Every call should end with a calendar invite going out before you hang up. If yours don’t, the tape will show you exactly where it slipped.

After two calls, you’ll have a list of things you want to fix. Ignore most of it.

Pick one thing. The biggest one. Write it on a sticky note and put it on your monitor where you’ll see it during every call next week. “Ask the second question.” “Shut up after the price.” “Calendar invite before hanging up.”

Next Friday, watch two more calls and check just that one thing first. Did it improve? Good. Keep it for another week, then add the next one. Seven skills, one at a time, a few weeks each. In six months, you’ll sell like a different guy, and you won’t have read a single new sales book.

The first time I did this, I picked a call I was proud of. A discovery call with a manufacturing company that I’d walked away from thinking I’d nailed it.

My talk time was 68 percent.

Worse, I found a spot about eleven minutes in where the owner started to tell me about a fight he’d had with his business partner over hiring. It was the most important thing he said on the whole call. It was the real reason he was looking for help. And I cut him off, politely, to get back to my questions. I literally said “that makes sense” and moved to the next item on my list.

We never closed that deal. At the time I blamed the timing. On the tape, I could see the exact second I lost him.

I didn’t need a course to fix that. I needed one sticky note that said “follow the tangent,” and about three weeks of watching myself not do it, then do it a little, then do it on purpose. My close rate on first calls moved more that quarter than it had in the two years before it.

If you’ve got anybody else selling for you, this gets more valuable, not less.

Once a week, pick one call from somebody on the team and watch it together. Fifteen minutes of a real call, then fifteen minutes of talking about it. Start every session with what went right, then one thing to work on. Never more than one.

The first few times, watch one of your own calls with the team. Let them see you make mistakes. That’s what makes it safe for them to put their own calls up. If the owner is the only one who never gets reviewed, the film room turns into a firing squad and nobody learns anything.

“I don’t have an hour a week.”

You have an hour a week to run calls that close at whatever rate they close at now. Move your close rate from 25 percent to 30 percent and you’ve added twenty percent more revenue from the same pipeline. Find me another hour in your week with that return.

“Recording feels awkward.”

For about two calls. Then you forget it’s on, and so does the buyer. The note taking alone pays for it. You’ll actually look at the person instead of scribbling.

“I already know what I do wrong.”

Then you’ll see it on the tape in the first ten minutes and you’ll be done early. But I’ve watched this play out with a lot of operators, and almost none of them were right about their biggest problem. The thing you think you do wrong usually isn’t the thing costing you deals.

“I hate watching myself.”

Everybody does. That’s the point. The discomfort is the information.

Three things, before your next sales call:

One hour a week, one thing at a time. The tape won’t flatter you the way your memory does, and that’s exactly why it works.

Sunday, we’re turning the camera around. Because there’s another set of people who’ve been watching your tape for years, and they’ve got some notes for you.

Refined. Relentless. Unapologetic.

Marcus